Rindon Johnson, An island is all surrounded by water In the morning foreboding. . .

Rindon Johnson: My name is Rindon Johnson.

I work with leather because it’s a byproduct of the meat industry. A lot of my original thesis with this work was thinking about how American Blackness is a byproduct of the transatlantic slave trade and I wondered what other byproducts I could work with. I began to realize, when I started trying to find a material that was as Black as I was, that, because of the way that capitalism functions in our society—especially in American society—every material is touched by the violence of it. And so what became clear to me was that I could choose any material and it would be filled with the charge and the pain of capital accumulation.

Narrator: Other products—like indigo, coffee, wax, and wood stain—also interested Johnson because they share histories inflected by exploitation. These materials trace colonial trading routes and exhaust natural resources. Though he uses these materials to alter the cow hide, he purposefully adds little fixatives and in doing so acknowledges the impermanence of these marks.

Rindon Johnson: I’m using a series of indigo baths and indigo washes across the cows to try and arrive at a very deep blue. It’s not going to work, and so much of my work is about things not working.

Narrator: Johnson marries a set of material reactions in this work: the mercurial nature of the colors he uses and the leather’s subsequent changing over time. The artist describes this relationship as a “line of recognition” between one medium and another.

Rindon Johnson: I have a lot of questions about neglect and I have a lot of questions about what it means to leave something alone. Do you leave something alone because you want to give it the agency to be itself or do you leave something alone because you don’t care about it?